A Game
by SirPolarBear
Summary: Somewhere in Nevada, there lies a game. (A Madness Combat fanfiction.)


Somewhere in Nevada, there lies a game.

It is, you decide, your greatest game yet. Raising the stakes only raises the excitement, of course! And now you can watch from your perch on the brink of humanity and madness.

You arrange your players carefully, sprinkle grey sand across the board. You place buildings in a fantastic array of obstacles. Your setting is bleak, and your players all sleep.

What fun toys.

You give them hopes and dreams and just enough drive to keep them moving forward. Games are no fun when everyone quits a few minutes in.

It's your masterpiece, you decide. It will not disappoint.

It will not disappoint.

Somewhere in Nevada, there lies a game.

First, of course, are the pawns. They stand shivering in the thick desert air, then within tall corporate-looking buildings, and they are mowed down, one by one, their gore spattering and sullying their respective tiles.

Pawns, of course, are just about useless unless you play them right.

You've never played wrong.

This is how you know time is a man-made concept, as these pawns are what make time. Each drop of blood on the wall is another second, each gunshot a minute. Pawns set the stage, clear the dust, sharpen the players' skills. Move them, experiment, strategize.

You paint them a few times, adorning their faces with shades, then suits, then armor. Yet a pawn is a pawn all the same, no matter how you dress it.

You start with ten dead. Then twenty. Then thirty.

You lose count once you hit 1000. A shame, you might say, had you cared at all in the first place. Yet no one cares for pawns.

You never bothered to learn their names.

Somewhere in Nevada, there lies a game.

Knights do not need pawns to operate. Knights need not wait. Knights need not follow the rules of the rest; they may go where they please.

You imagine that they might have done well, had they not convinced themselves that they needed each other.

Knights come in pairs, yet you have never seen a duo this closely knit. Their hand gestures can convey entire conversations. They traverse from car to car, finally settling on a horrid looking grey sedan. They waste time digging through hand-me-downs and escape every shot you send their way.

Cigarette smoke unfurls into a promise of death. Dark round shades are smashed and broken. A suicide mission flashes across a PDA.

Knights must inevitably split.

One goes to one end of the board, and the other to the opposite side.

It is a shame, you think, when a pawn claims a knight. The knight is smashed into dust and ashes, and across the board your remaining knight falters.

The faltering is what gets him surrounded. Knights must not need each other. Knighthood is not a partnership.

Somewhere in Nevada, there lies a game.

A bishop is a holy man, is he not? Bishops move how they'd like. They do not strike forward - rather diagonally.

Being holy is harder than it looks.

You watch the bishop move across the board in grandiose sweeps, then falter. You never expected your key player to actually attempt to take him out.

The bishop is faster.

The bishop is not.

You watch, half perturbed and half amused, as the bishop is blown to nothing. You hadn't counted on him being wiped off the board so swiftly.

You hadn't counted on him coming back, eyes glaring red and head stitched together like a rag doll.

The bishop, you discover, is unpredictable. A paradox of a priest, the most demonic holy man you've ever laid eyes upon.

You're quite fond of him, really.

Perhaps it's cheating when you give him a few more runs, a few more moves when he is cornered.

Perhaps you're becoming biased.

His perception of his supposed free will, however, is becoming concerning, and it simply cannot be. You have rules to this game, mind you. Your king is getting antsy.

 _Goodnight, bishop, goodnight._

Somewhere in Nevada, there lies a game.

What is a rook?

A castle, a _ladya_ , a joker, a jester, a clown.

In a proper game, rooks ought to be qualified as a major player. Their role is but minor in the beginning of course. The pawns are often slow to move out of the way, trapping the rook's true potential.

The rook may entertain itself with minor players. Pawns and knights make suitable cannon fodder.

You realize far too late that you have lost control of your rook. Perhaps you never truly had control in the first place.

The rook flies across the board, knocking off pawns, attempts on the lives of your knights, engaging in battle after battle with your queen. It is a volatile creature.

volatile - adj. tending or threatening to break out into open violence; explosive

ex. an insatiable player, a piece painted black, then white, then red, then green.

Green.

Black.

Red.

You lose sight of him. The world implodes in upon itself, white shockwaves shaking the earth.

The pawns fall through the cracks in the soil down to the salvation of hell that awaits them. The knights grasp each other in the quakes. The bishop raises his eyes to the sky and sees holy. The queen sleeps at last.

The rook is exorcised in green, black, and red. The rook giggles a gurgle of blood and phlegm.

The rook does not sleep.

Somewhere in Nevada, there lies a game.

In every game, there is one piece that is the most powerful. There is one player who rises from the ashes and assumes greatness. Sometimes through diplomacy, sometimes through leadership, sometimes through blood.

Your queen is not what you would have expected - a man of black, a man of red. A man who works in night and the day, gritty hands and bloodshot eyes.

There's something fantastic about his plays that captivates you. The execution is stunning - almost flawless, not quite.

It must be his reluctance. With each dowsing of blood, he seems to pray for sleep. Had he only asked, you may have granted it to him.

A shame for the others that he doesn't really pray.

One hundred corpses. Smatterings of guts, gushes of blood. He goes on.

The body count climbs higher.

You send in pawn after pawn, your rook, your bishop.

He bleeds, he dies, but he does not stop. He treats himself with all the value of a pawn - one sacrifice after the next. He advances across the board in a steady sweep, taking out pawns, knights, the rook, the bishop - he is more than you bargained for.

You do not think of yourself as a petty host. Yet there is something so infuriating that lies within his steady gaze and emotionless face. He does not scream, he does not speak. He simply does.

You despise him.

He is broken and morphed - a fate you would have found fitting had he not harnessed the strength of the mutations and turned himself into a better weapon.

You despise this weapon, this most powerful player, and you vow then that he will never sleep.

Somewhere in Nevada, there lies a game.

At the end of your board, he waits.

A king does nothing at first. He is just there, his presence omnipotent and constant.

Supposedly.

The veins of the pawns rush to him; their spilled blood becomes his armor. He lies in wait for the queen.

It is the showdown of a lifetime. Multiple lifetimes - as long as you've been around, without a doubt.

You watch, bemused, as a knight tags along for the ride. You make a note to yourself to dispose of him shortly, but that will wait.

The endgame phase has begun. Your game has reached its climax, and you intend to see it through until the end.

You did not count upon pulling a wild card.

Your wild card emerges in screams and smoke - billows and billows, the stench of thousands of bodies - fermenting flesh, bubbles and boils.

Your eyes are singed. You cannot see.

The board is ripped apart in a flash of blinding light. Your buildings collapse into nothing, your remaining players cover their eyes with their hands, a shadow sucks in the corpses and the sun in a raspy breath.

You have lost the game you created.

A shaky sun breaks through the smog.

Somewhere in Nevada, there lay a game.

 **A/N: A belated birthday gift for a fantastic writer and even better friend, Spirit9871. Hope you enjoyed it, dude! c:**


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